Hands-On With Lonely Planet iPhone Guide NYC: Crashy, Handy, Bagel-y

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Hands-On With Lonely Planet iPhone Guide NYC: Crashy, Handy, Bagel-y

In order to bring you the best, most in-depth look at the Lonely Planet New York City Guide for the iPhone, I took a week-long trip to the Big Apple. Is there nothing I won’t do for you, the loyal Gadget Lab reader?

A little over a week ago we took a quick look at the rather promising iPhone application, a $16 app which drops almost all the content of the paper book into a handy, searchable pocket sized piece of software. On paper (ahem) it seems unbeatable, especially when combined with the iPhone’s location awareness which means no more searching for a decent nearby restaurant.

How did it fare? The short answer is “not too bad". For the longer answer, and the major problems (including an iPhone-killing crash), read on.

The biggest drawback was actually pointed out by Gadget Lab reader Jason Halberstadt: The source book itself. Like most guides, the Lonely Planet is not updated every year, so some information can be a little old. This is fine for a book, but somehow it seems that a mobile app should be a little fresher. Also, as Jason points out, “you end up going to all the tourist traps and hangouts that other LP readers all go to."

The actual app promises much. Once it has (finally) started up, you can browse by section, as in the book, click to see what is nearby, access an offline map, save and view favorites (read: bookmarks), look at a photo gallery and search the entire guide.

Book

This makes for good reading before you leave, or for something to dip into when waiting for the next metro. It also offers a good overview of each section of town. It’s the most traditional, book-like section of the app, so you probably know exactly how useful it is already.

Nearby

Along with the map, this was the most handy part of the app, and worth the $16 price alone. It brings up a list of the places nearest you, ordered by distance. As it uses the iPhone location services to tell where you are, it doesn’t work too well with the iPod Touch (unless you make use of the countless open Wi-Fi spots in Manhattan). If you see something you fancy, tap on the map icon and it’ll show you just where to go.

When the iPhone can get a location fix, this feature was great. When it couldn’t, it was just confusing.

Map

Notably not called “maps" plural, this section omits several of the maps in the paper book, and inexplicably doesn’t feature a guide to the NYC subway. It also has a bad habit of resetting every time you leave the application, which means that you start at the most distant zoom level every time. The map has an overlay so you can see nearby hotels, bars, restaurant, shops and attractions, but these clutter things and slow them down. They can all be toggled on and off but, you guessed it, they default back to “on" every single time you launch.

It is also missing names for any but the largest streets, and you can’t search by street name. It works, and the maps are all offline, but it could be so much better.

Favorites

They’re bookmarks. Hit the heart-shaped icon when you see it to save.

Images

Fine, but we can’t help thinking that this is a major part of the hefty ~50MB download, and possibly one of the things causing such long load times. Better to keep these on the website, we’d say.

Search

The search is fantastic, and is way better than using the index in the actual book (the Lady is one of people who translated the book into Spanish, so we have a copy). It picks up anything, not just place names or titles, so you can use it to search for, say, bagel and browse all the mentions in the book (in New York, that’s surprisingly only eight results).

There was one problem. Although fine when it works, the search function caused the app to crash. A lot. Two or three times it caused a complete freeze of my iPod Touch, which required pressing both hardware buttons down for more than 10 seconds to force a reboot. This isn’t such a handy feature.

Conclusion

The idea is sound, and the fact that its a proper, edited guide means good and accurate content. It’s still very rough (ahem) around the edges, but certainly worth the money. We’d like to see some more user generated content, though: reviews, suggestions and other wiki-like features which are more up-to-date then the fusty old sections found here. The good ones could be folded into future paper books, too.

Also, if you’re going to New York and don’t mind a little grime, stay in the Chelsea Hotel. Bonus: About five doors down (towards the East) there’s a great, cheap Deli.